Ethereum | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Intro A sophisticated, high-resilience malicious campaign was identified by Atos Threat Research Center (TRC) in March 2026. This operation specifically targets the high-privilege professional accounts of enterprise administrators, DevOps engineers, and security analysts by impersonating administrative utilities they rely on for daily operations. By integrating Search Engine Order (SEO) poisoning , a dual-stage GitHub distribution architecture , and decentralized blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) resolving, Threat Actors have established a highly resilient delivery and persistence mechanism. Creative Distribution via GitHub Facades The campaign utilizes a multi-layered delivery chain designed to evade platform-level takedowns and maintain a high search engine ranking. The attack begins with SEO poisoning on various search engines, including Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex. That ensures that malicious results for niche IT terms rank at the top of search ...

A new distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet known as Kimwolf has enlisted a massive army of no less than 1.8 million infected devices comprising Android-based TVs, set-top boxes, and tablets, and may be associated with another botnet known as AISURU , according to findings from QiAnXin XLab. "Kimwolf is a botnet compiled using the NDK [Native Development Kit]," the company said in a report published today. "In addition to typical DDoS attack capabilities, it integrates proxy forwarding, reverse shell, and file management functions." The hyper-scale botnet is estimated to have issued 1.7 billion DDoS attack commands within a three-day period between November 19 and 22, 2025, around the same time one of its command-and-control (C2) domains – 14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132[.]su – came first in Cloudflare's list of top 100 domains, briefly even surpassing Google. Kimwolf's primary infection targets are TV boxes deployed in residential network en...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of an actively expanding botnet dubbed Tsundere that's targeting Windows users. Active since mid-2025, the threat is designed to execute arbitrary JavaScript code retrieved from a command-and-control (C2) server, Kaspersky researcher Lisandro Ubiedo said in an analysis published today. There are currently no details on how the botnet malware is propagated; however, in at least one case, the threat actors behind the operation are said to have leveraged a legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tool as a conduit to download an MSI installer file from a compromised site. The names given to the malware artifacts – Valorant, r6x (Rainbow Six Siege X), and cs2 (Counter-Strike 2) – also suggest that the implant is likely being disseminated using game-related lures. It's possible that users searching for pirated versions of these games are the target. Regardless of the method used, the fake MSI installer is designed to install Node...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a malicious Chrome extension that poses as a legitimate Ethereum wallet but harbors functionality to exfiltrate users' seed phrases. The name of the extension is "Safery: Ethereum Wallet," with the threat actor describing it as a "secure wallet for managing Ethereum cryptocurrency with flexible settings." It was uploaded to the Chrome Web Store on September 29, 2025, and was updated as recently as November 12. It's still available for download as of writing. "Marketed as a simple, secure Ethereum (ETH) wallet, it contains a backdoor that exfiltrates seed phrases by encoding them into Sui addresses and broadcasting microtransactions from a threat actor-controlled Sui wallet," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . Specifically, the malware present within the browser add-on is designed to steal wallet mnemonic phrases by encoding them as fake Sui wallet addresses and then using micro-transact...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malicious extension in the Open VSX registry that harbors a remote access trojan called SleepyDuck . According to Secure Annex's John Tuckner, the extension in question, juan-bianco.solidity-vlang (version 0.0.7), was first published on October 31, 2025, as a completely benign library that was subsequently updated to version 0.0.8 on November 1 to include new malicious capabilities after reaching 14,000 downloads. "The malware includes sandbox evasion techniques and utilizes an Ethereum contract to update its command and control address in case the original address is taken down," Tuckner added . Campaigns distributing rogue extensions targeting Solidity developers have been repeatedly detected across both the Visual Studio Extension Marketplace and Open VSX. In July 2025, Kaspersky disclosed that a Russian developer lost $500,000 in cryptocurrency assets after installing one such extension through Cursor. In the latest...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious Rust crates impersonating a legitimate library called fast_log to steal Solana and Ethereum wallet keys from source code. The crates, named faster_log and async_println, were published by the threat actor under the alias rustguruman and dumbnbased on May 25, 2025, amassing 8,424 downloads in total, according to software supply chain security company Socket. "The crates include working logging code for cover and embed routines that scan source files for Solana and Ethereum private keys, then exfiltrate matches via HTTP POST to a hardcoded command and control (C2) endpoint," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . Following responsible disclosure, the maintainers of crates.io have taken steps to remove the Rust packages and disable the two accounts. It has also preserved logs of the threat actor-operated users along with the malicious crates for further analysis. "The malicious code was executed at runtime...

A new set of four malicious packages have been discovered in the npm package registry with capabilities to steal cryptocurrency wallet credentials from Ethereum developers. "The packages masquerade as legitimate cryptographic utilities and Flashbots MEV infrastructure while secretly exfiltrating private keys and mnemonic seeds to a Telegram bot controlled by the threat actor," Socket researcher Kush Pandya said in an analysis. The packages were uploaded to npm by a user named " flashbotts ," with the earliest library uploaded as far back as September 2023. The most recent upload took place on August 19, 2025. The packages in question, all of which are still available for download as of writing, are listed below - @flashbotts/ethers-provider-bundle (52 Downloads) flashbot-sdk-eth (467 Downloads) sdk-ethers (90 Downloads) gram-utilz (83 Downloads) The impersonation of Flashbots is not coincidental, given its role in combating the adverse effects of...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two new malicious packages on the npm registry that make use of smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain to carry out malicious actions on compromised systems, signaling the trend of threat actors constantly on the lookout for new ways to distribute malware and fly under the radar. "The two npm packages abused smart contracts to conceal malicious commands that installed downloader malware on compromised systems," ReversingLabs researcher Lucija Valentić said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The packages, both uploaded to npm in July 2025 and no longer available for download, are listed below - colortoolsv2 (7 downloads) mimelib2 (1 download) The software supply chain security firm said the libraries are part of a larger and sophisticated campaign impacting both npm and GitHub, tricking unsuspecting developers into downloading and running them. While the packages themselves make no effort to conceal their malici...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious npm package that comes with stealthy features to inject malicious code into desktop apps for cryptocurrency wallets like Atomic and Exodus on Windows systems. The package, named nodejs-smtp , impersonates the legitimate email library nodemailer with an identical tagline, page styling, and README descriptions, attracting a total of 347 downloads since it was uploaded to the npm registry in April 2025 by a user named "nikotimon." It's currently no longer available. "On import, the package uses Electron tooling to unpack Atomic Wallet's app.asar, replace a vendor bundle with a malicious payload, repackage the application, and remove traces by deleting its working directory," Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said . The main objective is to overwrite the recipient address with hard-coded wallets controlled by the threat actor, redirecting Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT and TRX USDT), XRP...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a supply chain attack targeting a Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension called Ethcode that has been installed a little over 6,000 times. The compromise, per ReversingLabs , occurred via a GitHub pull request that was opened by a user named Airez299 on June 17, 2025. First released by 7finney in 2022, Ethcode is a VS Code extension that's used to deploy and execute solidity smart contracts in Ethereum Virtual Machine ( EVM )-based blockchains. An EVM is a decentralized computation engine that's designed to run smart contracts on the Ethereum network. According to the supply chain security company, the GitHub project received its last non-malicious update on September 6, 2024. That changed last month when Airez299 opened a pull request with the message "Modernize codebase with viem integration and testing framework." The user claimed to have added a new testing framework with Mocha integration and contract testin...

The U.S. Treasury Department has announced that it's removing sanctions against Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer service that has been accused of aiding the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group to launder their ill-gotten proceeds. "Based on the Administration's review of the novel legal and policy issues raised by use of financial sanctions against financial and commercial activity occurring within evolving technology and legal environments, we have exercised our discretion to remove the economic sanctions against Tornado Cash," the Treasury said in a statement. In conjunction with the move, over 100 Ethereum (ETH) wallet addresses are also being removed from the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. The department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Tornado Cash to its sanctions list in August 2022. It was estimated to have been used to launder more than $7.6 billion worth of virtual assets since its creation in 2019, the Treasury said a...